On Sat, 10 Feb 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote: > It is *not* a read-only operation. The index is too important to be > considered "just a technical issue". There is just a semantic issue that you seem to overlook completely. According to the dictionarry, "status" is a synonym to a "state". It is _not_ an action. So, from a _user_ perspective, the git-status command should give back a "status". Of _course_ the user will benefit from the index updating business, but as important as this update might be (and I do agree that it is fundamental for GIT's performance), this is still a by-product of the "status" command. Therefore, the fact that the index isn't writable should not prevent git-status from providing the very result for which its name was chosen. The index might as well be brought up to date on disk the next time the file system is writable. Nicolas - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html